Abstract: with the development of economic globalization and social informatization, network public opinion, as a new urban environment, poses new challenges to the global cities in response to the outbreak of infectious diseases such as COVID-19, H1N1, SARS, and puts forward higher requirements for the ability of government departments to deal with public health emergencies. Network public opinion is an important embodiment of public will and the correct guidance and supervision of it will help urban managers to ease public sentiment and reduce social conflicts. Wuhan metropolitan, as a severe disaster area of COVID-19, is a typical network public opinion concentration area. This paper extracts the geographical entity nouns within the scope of Wuhan metropolitan and analyzes the word frequency and emotion, based on the public opinion text data of mainstream social network platforms in China during the six months after the outbreak of the epidemic, and GIS is further used to analyze the spatial visualization and spatial autocorrelation of the analysis results. The results show that the areas with high word frequency form multiple agglomeration centers along the edge of Wuhan city center; the spatial distribution of positive and negative orientation of emotion in Wuhan metropolitan is unbalanced, and the difference between cities is significant; the correlation between word frequency and emotional orientation forms five typical regions in space. Based on this, this paper focuses on the areas where the word frequency is high and the emotional orientation is negative. In view of the problems exposed by the government departments in response to public opinion, combined with the similarities and differences of economic, cultural, educational level and other factors in this region, this paper comprehensively discusses the social governance mode of the hot spots and puts forward the countermeasures: (1) linkage with government departments at all levels to build a multi-subjects emergency public opinion warning and response system;(2) improve the government's top-down policy transmission channel, and block the spread of rumors with authoritative information; (3) appropriately enlarge the role of public opinion supervision of social organizations and liberate the discourse hegemony of the government; (4) comply with the development trend of the new media, strengthen the network standardized management; (5) weaken the information asymmetric and establish a new cooperation mechanism between the official departments and non-governmental organizations. The purpose of this study is to provide reference for the social governance of public opinion environment and support the construction of healthy city.

Cities are urban areas where we live, communicate, and navigate. Each area has its own characteristics which greatly affects its users. they can gather, crowd, or segregate us. Thus, urban planning has an evident role in controlling humans' behavior. This relation raises a question; in case of epidemic-spread, how can urban planning contribute to containing such a crisis? In the mid- nineteenth century, spatial analysis was the key solution for managing and containing cholera. during that time GIS (Geographical Information System) proved the inevitable relation between controlling an epidemic spread and urban planning. Recently, the world has been hit by a contagious disease which quickly turned into a pandemic known as COVID-19. This pandemic has been attacking countries with their different aspects; public health, economy, education, tourism, religious ritual, and urban planning. Many liveable capitals have been changed to ghost cities. Yet, even it is just a temporal effect, urban planning is a basic and effective tool to contain such a crisis. This paper will focus on the possibility of containing COVID-19 across different scenarios by proposing an urban planning approach using Space Syntax. The proposed approach targets effective management of COVID-19 crisis depending on overlaying epidemiological data with spatial analysis mainly Space Syntax analysis which acts as an exemplary tool to measure integration values of roads network to define the most integrated and the most segregated areas within a city. the resulted map would guide in predicting areas most vulnerable to epidemiological spread. Moreover, it would guide in breaking gradually existing curfew. First, this paper will review the linkage between urban planning and an epidemic crisis through listing some of the previous experiences in using spatial tools to contain an epidemic effectively. Then, this paper will propose a new urban planning approach to contain the epidemic as much as possible. Finally, results, conclusions, and recommendations will be listed.

Under the background of the rapid urbanization, suburbs have become the forefront of urban living space. Different with the dwellers in the city center, the daily behavior characteristics of suburban dwellers are more varied due to the commuting distance and employment opportunities. Meanwhile, the urban space using behavior is also significant influenced by their occupation and daily behavior. Thus, if the city governor only based on the socio-economic or population density index to allocate the public resources, it might result waste. In here, we attempt to discuss the approach to reduce this kind of waste through dynamic behavior perspectives. Based on the above, Shenyang (the provincial capital city which located in the Northeast of China) was selected as a sample. The research collected LBS (Location Based Service) big data of 24 hours for seven consecutive days. Based on ST-DBSCAN clustering algorithm, the movement trajectories and stop points of 874 suburban dwellers in southern suburbs were recognized. Then, combined with land use and POI data, the activity type of each stop point was identified, including working behavior, residential behavior, life-service behavior, commercial-entertainment behavior, outdoor-play behavior. Afterwards, based on the method of time-space geography and GIS platform，dwellers’ spatiotemporal distribution of different behaviors was analyzed. Meanwhile, due to the time rhythm occupation/living behavior，the dwellers were divided in five types of daily activity patterns: 9 to 5, early-out-early-return, early-out-late-return, late-out-early-return, late-out-late-return. Based on the classification, through the indicators of activity levels and spatial concentration, the spatiotemporal differences in use of community and city space were further analyzed and compared in detailed. The result indicated that from aspects of the frequency of activities, the duration of specific behaviors, and the time period of activities, people use urban space in different ways. Meanwhile, the time constraints greatly affect the spatiotemporal distribution of non-working behaviors outside homes, which further affects the use of city and community functional space. According to the above finding, this paper suggests that while the government strengthen the construction of public facilities in suburban communities, it also need to use methods such as employment-policy or transport-policy to relieve the time constraints of residents so as to make a more convenient life.

Since the oil crisis in the early 1990s, redeveloping industrial areas in the city centre -especially waterfront areas which were often used as heavy industrial sites because of their convenience for transporting materials and resources by waterway- has gradually become a global urban development trend. The primary goal of redeveloping waterfront industrial sites, as many policy-makers have claimed, is to open up the closed industrial areas to the general public, transforming waterfront areas from production spaces to open public spaces. However, because of the rise of neoliberalism since the 1980s, many of those urban redevelopment projects are fueled by private investments and therefore property-led. The involvement of and reliance on private investments, as many scholars have pointed out, lead to gentrification and privatisation of the redeveloped areas. As a result, in recent decades, we have seen in Cardiff, Sydney, Baltimore and many other cities all around the world that growing numbers of waterfront industrial areas have been transformed to places such as luxury waterfront apartment, fine restaurants, high-end shopping centres and cassinos. Some scholars arise their doubts about the publicness of public spaces in those areas, arguing that they only serve for customers and investors rather than the general public. And therefore, the waterfront urban regeneration areas are often pseudo-public spaces. Meanwhile, current research mainly focuses on Western cities, but tends to neglect cities in the global south. However, China is a country that desires more analysis. The transformation of waterfront industrial areas in Chinese cities is massive. In Mao Zedong’s regime (from 1949 to 1978), based on the communist ideology, Chinese cities served as ‘industrial production centres’. In Maoist China, therefore, urban growth was driven by industrialisation and the urban space was organised based on the forms of pro¬duction introduced by the Soviet-influenced Socialist state, while urban func¬tions in commerce, finance and services were suppressed. As a result, in Mao’s era, waterfront areas in Chinese cities, thanks to their advantages in waterway transportation, were full of industrial factories and storehouses which were not open to the general public. Since 1979, China adopted a market-oriented economic reform which turns Chinese cities from industrial production centres to consumption ones. And Shanghai was planned to be the multifunctional economic centre of China in the reform era. The economic reform, as a result, leads to a large number of urban lands in Shanghai’s city centre, especially the waterfront areas, which were used for non-commercial purposes in the pre-reform era being gradually redeveloped in recent decades. China’s economic reform, in David Harvey’s words, is ‘neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics’. Private investors, as a result, are encouraged to participate and invest in the redevelopment of industrial areas. For this reason, how does the involvement of private investments affect the publicness of urban spaces in the redeveloped waterfront industrial areas? To what extent the waterfront industrial sites are public after redevelopment? Can they provide genuine public spaces that can contribute to improving the inclusiveness of the city? No empirical studies have been carried out to answer those questions. This paper tries to explore answers to those questions based on three case studies in Shanghai. Drawing on a broad review of empirical approaches for assessing the publicness of urban spaces established in the existing literature, the paper adopts a property rights approach to quantitatively assess the degrees of publicness of the selected cases. Building upon the results of the empirical assessments in Shanghai, the paper proposes suggestions for policy-making that hopefully can help improving the publicness and inclusiveness of redeveloped industrial areas in cities in the global south.

In Latin American cities informal settlements and insecure land tenure are the result of an exclusionary planning and urban management system which fails to provide legal and secure housing for lower-income groups. Against this backdrop, the State implemented land-title and urban regulatory policies, in order to improve the housing conditions of these neighbourhoods and integrate their residents into the legal regime. This paper proposes to address the conflicts implied in the processes of urbanization and regularization of the villas of the city of Buenos Aires during the first government of Rodríguez Larreta (2015-2019). In the official political discourse the urbanization of informal settlements is considered one of the main axes of local management. Within this framework, institutional changes are being carried out, such as the creation of the Ministry of Social and Urban Integration. This regularization processes have raised many conflicts in the interaction between government decision-making and the needs of inhabitants of informal settlement. This conflicts are linked to a) the democratic participation of the inhabitants in the decision-making process at all stages, b) land management policies and domain regularization; c) the modalities and logic of relocation of inhabitants; d) the provision and access to infrastructure services and public spaces; e) the treatment of tenants and other more vulnerable groups. The paper will address three level of analysis: the network of actors linked to the urbanization process, the discrepancy between the official government discourse and the actions and the conflicts during the implementation of the urbanization and regularization policies.

This study examines how the development of water supply management happens over time in distinct types of informal areas in Mumbai and Nairobi. The financial differences and political barriers in both cities, together with the vast diversity factors, development patterns, and challenges of each study area show that reconsidering different approaches is significant in developing more inclusive paradigms in water provision in informal areas. Relevant to these concerns, this study aims to clarify water practices and explore inclusive ways of developing water supply management through the analyses of water provision modes and network systems in each study area. A series of field studies on the type of water sources and facilities, parties involved in water practices, and characteristics of water development was performed in six case studies (i.e., three in Mumbai and three in Nairobi) from 2014 to 2019. The main findings of this study show that an unconventional informal tenure system constrains the settlement typology and development of the physical access of service facilities in study areas. Moreover, the different measures taken by Mumbai and Nairobi in providing water supply to informal areas result in an unequal path for water development and various vulnerability levels. Therefore, we argue that the mixtures of policy- and practice-rooted practices ensure a more inclusive water development because they would lead to the sociotechnical arrangements of the technical system and institutional arrangements that better fit the local conditions characterized by different spatial structures and social variables.

Poor, illiterate immigrants unlawfully living in tiny, unhygienic, densely packed shanties on pavements, drains and public lands, doing menial and insignificant jobs: that is the image of slums and slum dwellers in the eyes of the general public and often, even the authorities (Dupont, 2008; Bhan, 2009). A generic narrative that establishes slums and their inhabitants as a blight on the city’s fabric, it devalues their contribution and refuses to acknowledge the phenomena of slum occurrence as flaws in the governance structures and policies. Such statements paint slums as mere beneficiaries of the city and their rights as human and economic assets are hugely compromised. Delhi’s current policy frameworks for deficit housing construction, slum rehabilitation, and labour welfare are still top-heavy and segregated. It merely provides a percentage of residents with subsidised shelters after demolishing their existing homes, livelihoods, and social capital. For example, with no real progress to date, the 14000 residents of Delhi’s first in-situ rehabilitation at Kathputli Colony that began in 1986, don’t hold much hope (Banda et al, 2013). Such precedents paint a worrisome picture for the 3 million slum population, expected to rise at 75,000 people annually. For the low-income population of Delhi, disease-prone polluted environments aggravate the consequences of inaccessibility of sanitation and potable water. The city’s ecological wealth in water bodies, forests, parks, etc., are protected with fences and laws instead of season and topography sensitive practices that would make them self-sufficient productive parcels of land rather than mere destinations. Projects and funding policies look at slum upgrading and environmental upgrading as separate projects. The labour force that enables all these projects that serve the city is then relegated to the city’s leftover spaces - drains, railway tracks, etc. This research-by-design attempts at looking at the city's human, ecological, and economic prospects as a collective to aim for a framework that mutually benefits us all. It advocates undertaking livelihood enhancement within the local networks and capitals. Therefore, the local ecology finds agents of upkeep in the local slum residents. They, in turn, get additional opportunities that recognise their skills and can then incrementally improve their living conditions themselves. The study location Lajpat Nagar, with one of the largest retail cloth markets of the city, houses 25% of its population in seven slums. A detailed urban design study to understand the heterogeneity and networks of ethnicity, livelihood, classes, and shelter across the larger precinct was fundamental to the query. Accordingly, the slums are reimagined with community spaces along with the infrastructure to reinforce the socio-spatial interdependencies of houses, markets, schools, hospitals, etc. with new facilities for a better liveable environment. It aims to engage all the classes as agents of establishing a circular urban economy with waste recycle systems, weekly markets for upcycled handicrafts, produces from urban farming parks along with providing facilities for healthcare and education; bringing everyone closer with a dignified shared identity. At 19%, Delhi has the highest geographical area under green cover amongst Indian metropolitan cities. With a 14.8% slum population beside a mere 10% population living in planned colonies, Delhi’s diaspora of classes trying to survive failing housing and infrastructure make a strong case for the argument that the paper puts forward. Cities must devise strategies to project themselves into a better future that account for the growth and migrant population influx it is likely to see. The larger argument of the paper is to look at a bottom-up approach where the needs or issues of the wider society are solved with the population that is blatantly blamed for the same.

A good public space must be accommodative for everyone including the marginal, the forgotten, the silent, and an undesirable people. With the process of development, the city leaves behind the marginalized section of the society especially urban poor, who constitute about 20-30 percent of the urban population and are majorly involved in informal settlement like congested housing typologies and informal economy in which they face the everyday social, physical and economic exclusion. Thus, the informal sector and the marginalized becomes the forgotten elements in urban space. ‘Cities for the Citizen’ a slogan described by Douglas address the same issues of democratization, multicultural/gender difference between humans. Though these people have strong characteristics and share a unique pattern and enhances the movement in the city which makes a city a dynamic entity. The lack of opportunities and participation to such section leaves the city divided and generates the negative impacts in the mind of victims which further leads to degradation of their mental health and city life because of their involvement in crime, unemployment, illiteracy and unwanted areas. The physical, social, cultural and economic aspects of space should accommodate the essential requirements for the forgotten and provide them with inclusive public environment. It is very necessary that they generate the association and attachment to the place of their habitation. We can easily summarize that the city which used to be very dynamic and energetic is now facing the extreme silence in the present pandemic times. The same people are returning back to their homes after facing the similar problems of marginalization and exclusion even during hard times where they had no place to cover their heads. So, we have to find the way in which they can be put into consideration and make them more inclusive and self-sustaining. With the economic stability, social stability is also equally necessary for the overall development of an individual. So, the paper tries to focus upon the idea of social urbanism which talks about development of cities aiming to the social benefit and upliftment of their citizen. The social urbanism strategy in any project tries to inject investment into targeted areas in a way that cultivates civic pride, participation, and greater social impact. Thus, making the cities inclusive and interactive for all the development. The paper will tries to see such spaces as a potential investment in term of city’s finances and spaces to generate a spatial & development toolkit for making them inclusive by improving the interface of social infrastructure.

Contemporary global urbanization continues to heighten at unprecedented rates. In the global south, cities have been growing rapidly in population size and expanding to form huge metropolis which present manifold development challenges. As the drumbeat about the urgency to address cross-cutting development challenges becomes louder, cities have increasingly adopted and applied the conventional planning toolkit to control and guide urban development. Subsequently, urban plans have been aligned to the stringent standards of the toolkit. Owing to the complexity cities, this approach has turned counter-productive especially for the urban poor, with striking impacts of forced evictions, demolitions, destruction of property and disruption of livelihoods. This substantiates the insufficiency of the conventional planning toolkit to address the slum realities and exacerbates inequality. Against this backdrop an alternative planning approach was adopted in preparation of Mukuru Special Planning Area Integrated Urban Development Plan (Nairobi, Kenya) completed in early 2020. Mukuru; one of the largest of over 150 informal settlements in Kenya and home to more than 100,561 households (301,683 persons –466 persons/acre) had overtime been plagued by an array of pertinent development challenges. While the settlement manifested a staggering number of challenges, it also presented an equal astounding number of unique development opportunities. Cognizant of this, a community-driven settlement profiling approach was initiated in 2016 which yielded an invaluable drive for community action in advocacy towards evidence-based planning. This prompted the local government to declare Mukuru a Special Planning Area. The declaration provided a rare window to influence how slum inventions are designed and implemented not only nationally but globally. A two-year planning process commenced with an aim of improving infrastructure, promoting health, sanitation, public safety, order, and human dignity whilst minimizing displacement and mitigating the (in) direct impacts of developments on the environment. Given the existing conditions, this seemed a rather ambitious goal, unattainable through the conventional planning approaches. An innovative planning approach was requisite. This became the genesis of a people-centered, alternative planning system which I dub the “Collective Frugality in Rethinking, Re-planning, Reimagining urban informal settlements”. The approach was characterized by: collective action of hundreds of Mukuru residents at the heart of the planning process, coalition building with tens of organizations (local government, civil society, academia, and private sector) who were mobilized into 8 consortia built based on the thematic sectors of planning, iterative planning with series of scenario modelling which tested viability of different planning standards and evaluated the social costs and benefits. This approach has developed, refined and demonstrated what the notion of communities-at-the-center-of-planning actually looks like. With no financial resources allocated for plan preparation, this frugal community planning approach was able to successfully produce: alternative planning guidelines for informal settlements, 7 Sector(thematic) Plans and a Mukuru Integrated Development plan which has drawn interest from both local and national government. Notably, had the conventional planning standards been applied, the final plan would have caused 100% displacement of the residents. However, developing a number of iterations based on alternative, practical standards minimized the displacement considerably to 12.53%. Additionally, recent developments have seen the national government invest 1.5 billion Kenya shillings for infrastructure development in Mukuru and has further declared more settlements as Special Planning Areas, with the aim of adopting the alternative all-inclusive planning approach. To attain the global targets i.e. sustainable development goals, and to build health-resilient cities, urban planning practice needs to rethink and understand the organic nature of cities - although conventional standards are instrumental, not all urban contexts can be simply programmed using the conventional tool kit: One size never fits all!